Forming creative partnerships for the sustainable future
Sustainability education for students at UNIS Hanoi school © Fargreen.,JSC
It’s all about building communities. Together.
Building sustainable communities is our ultimate mission at Fargreen. Keeping that “why” focus has always been our focal point in directing any “what” activity that we decide to engage in at Fargreen as the whole. Further more, meditating on the concept of community and sustainability has allowed us to be creative, moving beyond the conventional thinking and forming close friendship and partnership with organizations that at first glance might sound unrelated to what we’ve seen doing at Fargreen from the outside, such as:
Cross Fields in Japan: The non-profit organization based in Japan that works on various projects to support the activities of NGOs/Social Enterprises utilizing cross sector/boundary collaboration.
The first and main collaboration that we do with Cross Fields is to receive professional volunteers from Japanese cooperations. These high skilled, mid-level professionals will come to support Fargreen’s work and at the same time, exposing themselves to new working, market and sector environments and cultures, thus, helping build their global leadership competency. We find this is such an excellent initiative of connecting the big corporations, many of whom has been around for more than a century, and small start-ups like Fargreen and putting us in a collaborative work that benefits both sides.
2019 marked the new level of Cross Fields and Fargreen’s collaboration which we went beyond our original partnership and moving toward new creative work of creating sustainable change across sectors and countries. One of the many highlights we did last year together was to complete the organic agriculture exchange program with two other organizations also working in the organic foods and agriculture sector with us but in different locations: one in Japan and the other in the Philippines under the support of the Toyota Foundation. We’re overwhelmed with new learnings at the end of the program. You can find more information on this work here.
Blue Dragon: The non-profit organization has been doing wonderful work in rescuing vulnerable kids in Vietnam for the past 17 years. Our two organizations have been an admirer of each other’s work for a long time and the year of 2019 brought an opportunity that we could bring Fargreen’s expertise of building sustainable work to help Blue Dragon in a new initiative of establishing a sustainable retreat area for their rescued children. For Fargreen, it is not just another service project that we did for our clients, it’s the opportunity that we saw our members and farmers cherished at heart as they got a chance to contribute themselves to a good cause which strangely enough, it’s not something common sense for people who are always been regarded as the “cause” to be in need of support from others. We can’t help but think of it as a new concept of empowerment seeing our farmers and members interacting with the kids, teaching them the garden work and exchanging stories. Most of these kids actually came from the countryside and the opportunity became so meaningful interaction on so many levels for all of us.
UNIS Hanoi: The United Nation International School is one of the two in the world (one in New York, USA and this one here in Hanoi, Vietnam). Following Trang’s presentation at the school’s STEAMfest last May, we found that we shared so many common values and really wanted to work together. Great partnership always starts that way when the two parties at first really like the work of each other and wants to work together then they find the work to do together, not the other ways around, don’t you think?
Starting winter 2019, Fargreen has partnered with UNIS’ service learning program to support the high school student’s sustainable garden group by transferring our practical knowledge and at the same time, giving its students opportunities to connect and support the communities that we’re working with. We can’t wait to see what 2020 will bring to our partnership!
GLG: The Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) is the world leader in knowledge marketplace. GLG serves thousands of the world’s best businesses, from Fortune 500 corporations to leading technology companies to professional services firms and financial institutions. Their global team connects clients to the world’s largest and most varied source of first-hand expertise, including executives, scientists, academics, former public-sector leaders, and the foremost subject matter specialists from a network of 700,000+ experts worldwide.
GLG Social Impact Fellowship is a pro-bono work of GLG dedicating to support impactful social entrepreneurs with free access to their platform to grow their venture to the next level.
In October 2019, our Founder and CEO Trang Tran together with eight other global social entrepreneurs was chosen to join the sixth class of GLG Social Impact Fellows. It is truly an honor for us - such a great helping hand came at the right time of need for Fargreen. We can’t wait to see what the next two years of GLG fellowship would bring to Fargreen!
If it takes the whole village to raise a child, it takes the whole ecosystem coming together to raise a sustainable community.
We believe that building sustainable communities is not a local and isolated work, it’s the ecosystem work. We are all connected and if we let our work be connected, we’ll be able to solve any problems. Our arms are always open to those who share our mission and core values. Looking forward to having you all in our network.
